The Incomparable Atuk Read Free

that happened, Gord Dolan, ever-watchful in the launch ahead, spurred his daughter on by holding up a blackboard on which he had written,
    DADDY DON’T LIKE QUITTERS
    The young girl’s effort in the face of seeminglyinvincible odds caught the imagination of Toronto as nothing had before. It’s true the much-admired Marilyn Bell had already swum the lake, but it had taken
her
twenty hours and fifty-one minutes, and it was much as if her accomplishment, remarkable as it was, redoubled interest in Bette Dolan’s attempt to better it. Anyway, the fact is that by six o’clock in the morning a crowd, maybe the largest, certainly the most enthusiastic, ever known in the history of Toronto, had gathered on the opposite shore to wait for Bette. They lit bonfires and sang hymns and cheered each half mile gained by the girl. Television technicians set up searchlights and cameras. Motor-cycle policemen and finally an ambulance arrived.
    Back in Toronto, as morning came and radio and television newscasters spoke feverishly of twelve-foot waves, some people prayed, others hastily organized office pools or phoned their bookies, and still more leaped into their cars and added to the largest known traffic jam in Toronto’s history. Sunny Jim Woodcock, The People’s Prayer For Mayor, spoke on Station CKTO. ‘I told you when I was elected that I would put Toronto on the map. Bette Dolan is setting an example here for youth all over the free world.
More power to your elbows, kid!’
The
Standard
, never a newspaper to be caught off the mark, printed two sets of their late morning edition. One with a headline, SHE MAKES IT ! wow!, the other, TOUGH LUCK, SWEETHEART!
    On the launch, Gord Dolan watched anxiously, he prayed, kissed his rabbit’s foot, and spat twice over his left shoulder, as his daughter struggled against the oncoming waves.
    ‘Please pull me in,’ she called. ‘Please … I can’t make it …’
    He scrawled something hurriedly on the blackboard and held it up for Bette to see again.
    THE OTHER BROADS HAVE QUIT. PARK AVE. SWIMWEAR OFFERS $2,500, IF YOU FINISH. DON’T DROWN NOW. DADDY
    But Bette had already been in the lake for sixteen hours. The plucky girl had come thirty-four miles. Thrashing about groggily, her eyes glazed, she began to weep. ‘… can’t feel my legs any more … can’t … think … going to drown …’
    ‘All right,’ Dolan said, gesturing his girl towards the launch, ‘we’ll pull you in now, kid.’
    But as Bette, making an enormous effort, swam to within inches of the launch Gord Dolan pulled ahead a few more yards.
    ‘Come on, honey. Come to Daddy.’
    Again she started for the launch and again Gord Dolan pulled away. ‘You see,’ he shouted to her. ‘You can do it.’
    (When Gord Dolan spoke on television several weeks later, after accepting the Canadian-Father-of-the-Year Award, he said, ‘That was the psychology-bit. I’ve made a study of people, you know.’)
    Initially, the prize money being offered was five thousand dollars, but once the last of the foreign competitors pulled out, as soon as it became obvious that Toronto had taken the surviving Canadian youngster to its heart and, what’s more, that she was on the brink of collapse, Buck Twentyman made a phone call. Minutes later a helicopter idled over Gord Dolan’s battered launch, a uniformed man descended a rope ladder, and Dolan was able to chalk up on his board,
    TWENTYMAN HISSELF OFFERS TEN MORE GRAND – IF YOU MAKE IT. DADDY IS MIGHTY PROUD. GO, BABY .
    When Bette Dolan finally stumbled ashore at seven p.m., after nineteen hours and forty-two minutes in the lake, she was greeted by a frenzied crowd. Newsreel cameramen, reporters, advertising agents, some who had prayed and others who had won bets at long odds, swarmed around her. Souvenir-crazed teenagers pulled eels off Bette’s thighs and back. The youngster collapsed and was carried off to a waiting ambulance. When she woke the next afternoon it was